


born to break the doors down

by tomato_greens



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 14:59:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles knows he has that glassy-eyed look which means he hasn’t slept in over twenty four hours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	born to break the doors down

**Author's Note:**

> For an anon on [Tumblr](http://tomato-greens.tumblr.com/post/38935392441/fic-born-to-break-the-doors-down). Title is from [Warrior](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDrschw-wdI) by Ke$ha. For the prompt "Maybe some sterek college students/studying for finals/ can one of them please be a lit major?" Derek's thesis is based on my own, don't judge me or, you know, like, steal my ideas.

Stiles knows he has that glassy-eyed look which means he hasn’t slept in over twenty four hours, and he’s definitely got a faint white crust of dried spit in one corner of his mouth–– “I’m disgusting,” he moans, and flops face-first onto Scott’s bed. “I’m disgusting and I hate books.”

“Uh-huh,” says Scott, who finished finals like two days ago and thus has relearned how to shower and drink water and communicate like an actual human being (never mind that Scott’s not human and hasn’t been for a couple of years now). “Okay. You mind being disgusting on your own bed?”

“I can’t,” Stiles moans, “I might kill myself if you leave me alone with my trauma. I’m never reading ever again.”

“Sure,” Scott says skeptically. 

“I’m serious,” Stiles insists, his voice slurred. “Never. Not ever. I have personally banned every single book in the library and my brain now has laser beams that shoot at temperature fahrenheit 451.”

“Okay, Mr. Comparative Literature and Computer Science Double Major,” Scott laughs, patting cologne onto his neck and wincing as it hits a shaving nick which was bad enough that even his healing mojo hasn’t entirely closed it yet, “sure, I believe you.” 

“Oh, shut up, why kick a man when he’s down,” Stiles groans, and promptly starts snoring. Scott rolls his eyes and straightens his tie and tries to hold his jaw so it looks slightly less uneven and breathes, “Allison, here I come,” before marching out of the dorm room.

“Weirdo,” Stiles huffs, smiling into the bedcovers. 

The problem is that Stiles forgot about Scott’s actual weirdo roommate, whose name is Derek Hale and who is some uncertain number of years older than them both, and who bursts into the room carrying approximately eight thousand books, all of which immediately drop to the floor with a huge and deafening bang as soon as Derek shuts the door and presumably sees Stiles.

“OH MY GOD,” Stiles shouts, sitting straight up, hands in his hair before he knows what he’s doing. Goddammit, this is how it gets so greasy in the first place.

“What the fuck,” Derek says. The _k_ is extremely well-articulated, and punches through the room like a shot.

“Hi, Derek,” Stiles says sheepishly. 

“Hi, Stiles,” Derek sighs, and bends down to start picking up the eight thousand books. “What are you doing here? Where’s Scott?”

“Scott is out with his sexy new ladyfriend,” Stiles explains, and then winces because he didn’t mean to make Scott sound like a forty-year-old on the town with a scarlet woman of the night, but these things happen. “And I’m recovering from my exams.”

“Oh,” says Derek, awkwardly, and stacks the books in his hands on his desk. Stiles definitely does not stare at the way he fills out his jeans, or the way they’re just slightly tighter than is possibly healthy for Derek’s junk. Not that Stiles thinks about Derek’s junk. Uh, at all. “Okay. Why are you doing that here?”

“I couldn’t be alone,” Stiles moans, and cuddles closer into Scott’s plaid bedsheets. “Scott forsook me but at least his bed loves me.” Derek raises his eyebrows (and there’s a lot to raise) and nods. Stiles plays the sentence back in his head twice and wants immediately to sink into the floor, but that doesn’t appear to be an option, so he just humphs and says, “Don’t judge our love, Derek. You don’t know what this bed and I have been through––oh, that didn’t make it better at all, did it.”

“No,” Derek says. “No, it did not.”

“Kill me now,” Stiles pleads. 

“The blood would be difficult to get out of the carpet,” Derek says, deadpan and staring down at the desk in front of him, but when Stiles squints at Derek’s face the corner of his mouth is curled up. 

Stiles feels very slightly less like he’s about to get seriously smote by werewolfian wrath or something. “My mother always swore by club soda in case of stains,” he says, smiling back at him.  
“Your mother was a very wise woman,” Derek says softly.

Stiles shrugs and extricates himself from Scott’s bedsheets, pulling his shirt down over his stomach. “My dad thought so,” he says. He knows he and Derek have this in common, although they never acknowledge it; without Scott there to act as a buffer it feels somehow easier to think about it. “What are you working on?”

“My thesis,” Derek says, because––right, Stiles forgot––he’s a senior. There aren’t that many people in Rainier Hall, where everyone who doesn’t check off “human” on their housing request live, so roommates tend to be pretty random. Stiles thinks it’s totally a violation of Constitutional rights, cordoning off people like that, but so far no one high up in university housing has listened to his complaints, so he and Scott still can’t room together. Anyway, Derek turned out to be pretty cool, at least as far as brooding super hot continuing ed students go. 

“What are you writing about?” Stiles asks, coming up behind him and running a finger along the spine of the topmost book–– _Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies_ , what the fuck. 

“Theater,” Derek says shortly, like he’s daring Stiles to say something about it. Maybe people give him shit for it, which is stupid because Derek is obviously 150% straight, what with his chiseled jaw and strong hands and the string of sexually frustrated women he leaves in his wake––

––okay, maybe not the last part, but no one should give Derek shit for anything, in Stiles’s opinion, so he nods and hops up on the desk next to the 400-page book and says, “That’s cool. What about theater?”

Derek shrugs sort of uncomfortably and huffs, “You probably wouldn’t be interested.”

Stiles grins at him. “Try me.”

“It’s about silence,” Derek says in a sort of warning tone. 

“I like silence, I can do silence,” Stiles says, which Derek greets with a disbelieving snort, but then Stiles makes some kind of complicated gesture with which he tries to say _Tell me more about it_ and _It sounds really interesting_ and also, just a little bit, _Your voice is always higher than I expect it to be and I find it unbelievably attractive_

“Put those away before you hurt yourself,” Derek says, giggling a little, embarrassingly high in his throat, one hand splayed over Stiles’s. “I’m talking about how silence is––well––I guess the best way to explain it is to say that I’m studying how an author uses silence as a bridge to communicate from author to audience. How he uses silence to breach the fourth wall, kind of, without actually breaking it.”

Stiles is a comp lit major, but he hasn’t taken a theory class yet, and he can see the names Bakhtin and Genette just from where he’s sitting so he knows he’s missing something big. “Run that by me again,” he says, “just with more explain-y words in between,” and the way Derek’s face lights up is pretty much worth sitting through an exhaustively nerdy breakdown of _The Dialogic Imagination._

(Three hours later, Scott comes in, Allison in tow, to find Derek and Stiles bent over a huge blue book with the name Lacan emblazoned on the cover. “Oh God,” he says, clearly reacting instinctively from living with Derek for the past couple months, and drags Allison back out. Stiles can hear him say, “Let’s go get some ice cream” through the door.

“You’ve trained him well,” Stiles says, impressed.

“Call it Pavlovian,” Derek says, his smirk wicked.)


End file.
